Kings Strength Coach Can’t Tough It Out

An odd piece of news was reported today by Rich Hammond – the Kings strength coach, Tim Adams, has resigned.

If you recall, Adams received a healthy dose of mockery when he was hired in 2009 for both his goofy motivational speaker type persona in videos and his history of training a football team that was riddled with injuries. That initial japery did not last long as Adams quickly proved himself to be a major upgrade in the Kings conditioning department. We saw Anze Kopitar’s strength and endurance skyrocket, Jack Johnson redistribute some of his weight away from his comically massive chest and the overall athleticism bar raised for the team.

According to Hammond, Adams left to ‘pursue other opportunities’. To me that means one of two things – either he was very politely fired, or trying to get Dustin Penner to drop weight drove Adams to the brink of insanity. Another possibility is that slapping donuts out of Doughty’s hands everyday gave him arthritis.

This is kind of an awful time to have to replace a strength coach. With training camp looming just a little more than a week away, players that haven’t been here all summer are beginning to trickle into town. Though they received their offseason regiments at the end of the season, they are about to begin training together as a team once more. Does this mean that the players will have a whole new program thrust at them when Adams’ replacement waltzes into the weight room? This could end up being a good thing, it could end up being bad.

If anyone cares to pay attention, which we probably won’t, where Adams resurfaces could be telling of the nature of his departure. If he takes a sweet gig, then like many of us, perhaps he simply did have a better opportunity in front of him, nothing against the Kings. If he doesn’t get a job for a while, then it is likely that the Kings were not happy with him and told/forced him to ‘resign’. If he takes a lesser job, then that tells us he was actively unhappy with some aspect of working for the Kings. Alas, this is a mystery that will likely remain unanswered, if it’s even a mystery at all. If there is anything suspicious about this move for Adams, all the more reason for it to be kept quiet… Or it truly could just be so mundane that there is nothing to say beyond ‘pursuing other opportunities.’. However in my experience, that is almost always a euphemism used to mask some sort of unpleasantness felt or perpetrated by one or both parties.

So let us simply hope that Adams’ replacement continues to do a good job and elevates our players to the next athletic level.

Hopefully it isn’t something in Adams personal life that has forced him to step down ahead of pending trouble to further himself from an organization that has been good to him, and bought into his strengthening philosophies, and even banked all their main investments on.

Just as bad would be some personal tiff with another member of the Kings staff. That would be kind of chidish considering the grand scheme of things, and the importance of his job.

We’ll probably never know, but if it’s any of those reasons, I hope I never find out.

From what I’ve read, they are already in shape (even with the beer belly).

There’s a report that Penner had been starting out with 1,000 yard lunges in the sand to start the summer and was on schedule to achieve 2,000 yards by midsummer to improve stamina, and cardio. H’e went from 2 hours a day during the summer to twice a days for 6 hours a day.

DD’s work out hasn’t been reported on, but he did an interview a few weeks back, and all the babyfat seems to be gone. He looks very lean and ready. Don’t think it will stop the fat jokes though.

If they (Kings) fire a coach, trainer, strenght/conditioning coach etc. they have no qualms stating that they fired such and such. I believe the guy simply resigned. It may be that the writing was on the wall (usually, you know when your time is up) but instead of waiting for the inevitable he simply left. It looks better on his CV as well…but here’s the real question: why do we care???

Well this is unplesent news because as you said Kopi was great lastseason..and he did give
credit to his conditioning coach several times..
I hope things work out for Tim..and I hope you will soon report on a great replacemnt..
GO KINGS GO !!!